So Long As We're Buying Votes, Why Not Buy Them Effectively?

North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum, the billionaire who’s now running in the Republican primaries for president, undeniably wants to be on the debate stage in August.  He’s offering a $20 gift card to the first 50,000 people who donate $1 to his campaign.

That’s nearly an instantaneous 2,000% return on your investment. It’s a pretty good deal for folks like you and me, though I doubt Burgum got rich making offers like this.

This offer did, however, get me to thinking: The political parties are mired in tradition; tradition has limited their thought. The parties spend literally billions of dollars in presidential election cycles. (In 2020, it was over $14 billion for all elections, combined.) That’s a lot of money, and the parties waste that money on things like polling, advertisements, rallies, and encouraging voter turnout.

How old-fashioned.

Finally, Burgum has moved the ball forward: Why not just buy votes? This might seem a little shady, but as long as the parties are spending this much to prompt each voter to act, why not forthrightly spend the money to buy the votes?

I have a couple of ideas that are almost as bold as Burgum’s, but might not seem quite so shady.

Why not fund a third-party candidate who would steal votes from your opponent, thus guaranteeing that your preferred candidate would win the election? For example, Ralph Nader, running as a third-party candidate, probably took enough votes from Al Gore to give Florida to George W. Bush in 2000. Jill Stein, running as a third-party candidate, may have taken enough votes from Hillary Clinton to give Pennsylvania to Donald Trump in 2016. Third-party candidates change elections. Let’s make this a feature, not a bug.

Some Republican PAC could give, say, $100 million to the third-party campaign of Cornel West, which would probably throw the 2024 election to Trump. Or the PAC could give $100 million to “No Labels,” and the campaign of, say, Joe Manchin could again give the election to Trump.

Of course there are two sides to that coin. Suppose that Trump is the Republican nominee for president.  Why don’t the Democrats entice Ron DeSantis, if he’s willing, or Chris Christie, to run as a third-party candidate, offering to contribute $150 million or $200 million to the campaign to get things rolling? That would be a much easier way to defeat Trump than just running more ads. (The Democrats basically legitimized this tactic in the most-recent election cycle, when Democratic-leaning organizations donated money to Republican election-deniers in the primaries to give Democrats easier opponents in the general election. I don’t see much difference between that shenanigans and mine.)

Better yet, let’s entice our side’s voters to move permanently to the swing states where their votes would make a difference. Democrats could, for example, identify committed Democrats who live in New York or California (which will be Democratic states even if they lose some Democratic support) and offer those voters $10,000 or $20,000 or $50,000 a head if the voters would agree to move permanently to Arizona or Georgia. Those states are often decided by very thin margins; move 20,000 Democrats to each, and you’d have purchased elections for the next few cycles.

The more I think about this, the more I like it! By moving just 100,000 people from lopsided Democratic states to key swing states, the Democrats could buy elections for a long time. Unlike get-out-the-vote drives, which influence only one campaign, my 100,000 voters who physically relocated to swing states would buy you the 2024 election, and the 2028 one, and probably 2032 to boot! If each side managed to raise (and spend) $7 billion in the 2020 election cycle, how much could they raise if they explained to contributors that they were buying not just the 2024 election, but also several more elections into the future?

The parties have been much too narrow in their political thinking. It’s time to broaden our thinking and realize how, with just a little creative thought, America could become corrupt right to its core.

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Mark Herrmann spent 17 years as a partner at a leading international law firm and is now deputy general counsel at a large international company. He is the author of The Curmudgeon’s Guide to Practicing Law and Drug and Device Product Liability Litigation Strategy (affiliate links). You can reach him by email at inhouse@abovethelaw.com.